Tennis Betting

Around the world, tennis is one of the most popular sports to bet on. The fact that the tennis schedule is packed with action means fans and bettors get plenty of action all year round. If you take a look at Betfair or one of the other betting exchanges you’ll see that even the smaller matches between lower ranked players often have hundreds of thousands in matched bets.

Of course the biggest events are the Grand Slam tournaments, The Australian, French and US Opens, and The Championships at Wimbledon. If you’re good at tennis betting, you’ll find that you have matches to bet on virtually every day of the year, unlike soccer for example, where there’s only really action on weekends and during the winter months.

If you want to get serious about tennis betting, then the first thing you have to do is become familiar with which sites are tops when it comes to the odds on offer. Bet365 is the preferred site for most serious tennis bettors as they have a very nice betting interface and a huge range of markets available on each match, as well as live scores and statistics. You should ideally also have an account at William Hill, as they’ll sometimes have slightly better odds than Bet365 and getting the best odds on your bets is obviously key to you winning some money in the long run. These two sites are usually the most competitive when it comes to tennis odds. If you’re an American, Bovada sports are by far your best bet.

Best Site for Online Tennis Betting

Resources for Tennis Betting

Like any sport, doing your research is key to winning your bets. One of the best things about tennis betting is the amount of stats available. The ATP Website maintains the records for all of its matches and pulling up past results and stats is extremely easy. At the bottom of the home page, there’s box where you can input the names of any two players and get all of their stats on everything from number of aces to first serve return percentage, as well as their head-to-head record over the years. If you spend some time looking at the stats you should be able to get good at pricing up the games pretty quickly

Tennis Betting Markets

While the ‘who will win’ market is always going to be the most popular, it isn’t necessarily going to be the one that offers you the best opportunity to win money. This is probably the easiest market for the bookmakers to price up and they rarely make mistakes here.

Other markets usually available on tennis matches are things like ‘total number of games’, and ‘who will have the most aces’ which are pretty self explanatory, then other like the ‘games handicap’ where the bookies might set a line of +5 for the underdog, meaning that if he loses 7-6, 7-6, 6-4, even though he has been beaten by 3 sets to nil, he has beaten the handicap because he only finished down 4 games in the match overall. Had he lost in 5 sets with scores of 0-6, 0-6, 6-4, 6-4, 4-6 he would have failed to cover the handicap because he lost by 10 games, despite performing much better in the match. This is a great market to bet on as the bookmakers lines can often be way off.

Another great market to bet on is the ‘more aces’ market. A good example of why appeared during the 2012 Wimbledon final, where Roger Federer was playing Andy Murray. For some reason most of the bookies decided that Federer’s dominance was such that he was sure to have the most aces, but if you go back and look at the head-to-head record between the two, you’ll see that Murray almost always have more aces, and he’s one of the best returners of serve in the game. The bookies had Federer a favourite in this market but for anyone who knew their tennis, it was clear that they were making a mistake.

Lastly a word of warning: Betting sites offer a lot of ‘in-play’ markets right down to ‘who will win the next point?’. These markets are almost always priced up HEAVILY in favour of the bookie and should be avoided almost always.